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By the middle of this decade, just three years from now, it will be the fast-growing emerging nations — not the traditional fat cats like us — who will produce and consume the lion’s share of the world’s goods and services.

In theory, this means the inevitable stiffer competition in Canada’s traditional markets will be balanced by ever-greater opportunities in fast-growing new ones. In a perfect world, it would come out a wash.

In the real world, only half of this equation is unfolding. Canadian exporters are, to be sure, losing market share in the rich nations where this country has always done well, but there’s no balancing upside. We remain a bit player in the rest of the world.

Indeed, according to a recent report by a group of top Canadian business leaders, policy experts and academics, Canada is steadily falling ever-further behind.

The report stems from a series of roundtables with business leaders that was sponsored by Gowlings law firm and conducted by the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. Its four co-chairs are straight out of Who’s Who in Canada. They are Derek Burney, a former senior diplomat and chief of staff in Brian Mulroney’s PMO who also has broad experience in Canadian boardrooms; Thomas d’Aquino, the former head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives; Leonard Edwards, formerly the deputy minister of foreign affairs and other federal departments and now a strategic adviser to Gowlings; and Fen Osler Hampson, the director of Carleton’s business school.

Their report has already got them an audience with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and they are to follow up with senior deputy ministers next month.

This high-level attention is overdue. And it’s likely to be even more urgently needed in future.

Three reports just released by the Conference Board of Canada, one on global growth prospects and two others that focus on Canada and the U.S., make it crystal clear that not only has the developing world been responsible for any glimmers of good news among the gloom of the recent past; it’s also the brightest hope for the future.

These analyses forecast that continuing chaos in Europe will only dampen, but not destroy, moderate growth in Asia, as well as the somewhat more tepid performance in Latin America. But these regions will be the best of a bad lot and will be largely responsible for boosting the global growth rate to a mediocre 2.6 per cent this year and three per cent next year.

The report from the roundtables notes that less than 10 per cent of Canada’s exports and — even worse, in my view — only four per cent of Canadian investment abroad go to these emerging markets, which are growing at twice the rate of the countries our manufacturers and investors continue to favour. With the U.S. economy struggling and Europe in danger of foundering, such inertia is hard to understand.

Without an abrupt change of direction, Canada’s position will only get worse as each year passes.

China is projected to have the world’s largest economy in less than a decade from now, the report notes.

“By 2050, emerging markets will be home to 60 per cent of the world’s wealth and 70 per cent of global trade. By 2050, less than eight per cent of global trade will take place in North America, compared to 15 per cent today.”

And, the report continues, “In the next 10 to 15 years, there will be one billion middle-class consumers in Asia and Africa.”

To turn this around and be competitive, these experts say, Canadian companies must become more aggressive and more focused on these markets.

And both the federal and provincial governments will have to “create an environment at home and abroad that enhances the capacity of Canadian businesses to be successful international players.”

Governments have been talking this talk for some time, of course, and also taking some steps — their fondness for trade missions is one example — in the right direction. The tepid results, however, make it clear that whatever they’re doing, it’s not enough.

It’s a sad irony that probably the best step that the B.C. government took to increase our businesses’ competitiveness — replacing the PST with the HST — has been repealed by popular demand. So the size of the challenge ahead is even bigger than it might otherwise have been.

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